FAQ: Information for 3rd Party Companies and Authors

FAQ Sections:

Become a Supporting Member

There are many benefits to becoming a donating member, including a permanent non-expiring license key for all of our programs, early access to beta releases and new reviews, discounts on popular shareware, and much more.

Still Have Questions?

You know the drill -- the first order of business is to search our site or forum for answers to your questions.

But don't hesitate to contact us directly with questions. We don't have secretaries - you'll get a reply right away from the same people who designed the website and coded the software here. Or post your questions on our public forum for a community response.

Live Chat

If you prefer, you can join our text chat channel on irc and speak to other DC members and administrators 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

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FAQ - Information for 3rd party companies and authors

Here are some common questions and answers for 3rd party companies and authors.

How do I offer a discount for my product to DonationCoder.com members?

We're interested in hearing from you.

Unlike other sites, we do not accept any commissions or affiliate sales on your products - we simply require that the discount be at least 30% and last at least 30 days.

In order to maintain a high standard of discounts, we do not accept all discount offers, and try to limit the discounts to only a few top quality programs per month.

We also request that you donate a few copies (typically 5) for us to give away publicly at the beginning of the month in a random software drawing. It's fun for our members and helps spread the word about the discount.

The discount will be mentioned on our web site and published in our newsletter.

If you are interested in offering a discount for our members please contact us through the Contact Us page.

Can you tell me what's involved in having my programs be part of DonationCoder.com?

This is a difficult question

We're still figuring this part out but here are some preliminary thoughts..

You might want to have your software be officially hosted on DonationCoder.com If:

Your interests are mainly in programming and having a fun user base for feature suggestions and beta testing, as opposed to getting rich quick.
You like the idea of donationware and want to be part of the resurgent donationware movement.
You're interested in making a little money but keeping your software free.
You don't want to have to worry about hosting and bandwidth limits and you'd like to be part of a larger user base and forum community.

You might *not* want to have your software be officially hosted on DonationCoder.com if:

You want to get rich from your programs. You are not going to get rich from donationware. Ever! You will be lucky if you get enough donations to buy yourself a cup of coffee each morning.
You already have hosting and a web page and are happy with it. We don't offer much besides hosting and a nice community, so if you're already happy with your existing hosting, there's not much point in moving your software to our site.
You aren't interested in talking to your users. We require that authors who live on our site make an attempt to respond to user questions and discussions.

How do I become an Official DonationCoder.com Author?

We don't have a well set policy for this yet. The way we've done it thus far is that programmers hang out at our forum and share their software. We are happy to provide free web space for freeware/donationware authors. After some period of time if we are a good match for each other we may agree to set up a more permanent integrated home for you on our main server.

Use the Contact Us page, or post on the forum to discuss the issue more.

Can I pay DonationCoder.com to have my software reviewed?

No.

This is simply something we do not do - and if you try to pay someone to post about your software on our site it will backfire and end up hurting your reputation.

Unlike other sites, however, we do not have a policy preventing people from posting about their own software on our forum. In fact we have lots of commercial and shareware software authors who hang out on our forum, and we are happy to hear about your own products, commercial or not. Just be sure you post it on the appropriate section of the forum, and make clear your relationship to the product.